A Sad, Sad Trick

Education savings accounts are currently being used by mostly middle-class families who are interested in leaving our public school system and enrolling in available private schools. What education savings accounts should be used for is to help primarily lower class families to find learning options for their kids so that those youngsters no longer have to attend “sucky schools.”

But what if lower class families have the right to choose other learning options than traditional school, but still don’t access those options?

Back in October, ProPublica posted an article titled “In a State With School Vouchers for All, Low-Income Families Aren’t Choosing to Use Them.” Here are highlights from that article:

“Alma Nunez, a longtime South Phoenix restaurant cashier with three kids, attended a community event a few years ago at which a speaker gave a presentation about Arizona’s school voucher program. She was intrigued.”

“Angelica Zavala, a West Phoenix home cleaner and mother of two, first heard of vouchers when former Governor Doug Ducey was talking about them on the news. He was saying that the state was giving parents money that they could then spend on private school tuition or homeschooling supplies. The goal was to ensure that all students, no matter their socioeconomic background, would have access to whatever kind of education best fit them. Zavala thought: The sounds great. Maybe it will benefit my family.”

”And Fabiola Velasquez, also a mother of three, was watching TV with her husband last year when she saw one of the many ads for vouchers that have blanketed media outlets across metropolitan Phoenix of late. She turned to him and asked, ‘Have you heard about this?’”

“Working-class parents like Nunez, Zavala and Velasquez have often said in surveys and interviews that they’re at least initially interested in school vouchers, which in Arizona are called Empowerment Scholarship Accounts. Many across the Phoenix are told ProPublica that they liked the idea of getting some financial help from the state so that they could send their children to the best, safest private schools – the kind that rich kids get to attend.”

“Yet when it comes to lower-income families actually choosing to use vouchers here in the nation’s school choice capital, the numbers tell a very different story. A ProPublica analysis of Arizona Department of Education data for Maricopa County, where Phoenix is located, reveals that the poorer the ZIP code, the less often vouchers are being used. The richer, the more.”

“In one West Phoenix ZIP code where the median household income is $46,700 a year, for example, ProPublica estimates that only a single voucher is being used per 100 school-age children. There are about 12,000 kids in this ZIP code, with only 150 receiving vouchers.”

“Conversely, in a Paradise Valley ZIP code with a median household income of $173,000, there are an estimated 28 vouchers being used per 100 school age children.”

“The question is, if there’s interest in school vouchers among lower-income families, why isn’t that translating into use, as conservative advocates have long promised would happen?”

“In our interviews, several families said that they simply didn’t know about the program. Some mentioned that they didn’t have the social contacts – or the time, given their jobs – to investigate whether vouchers would be a better option for their kids than public school, which is generally simpler to enroll and navigate.”

“But others, like Nunez, Zavala and Velasquez, said that they knew plenty about Empowerment Scholarship Accounts. Still, they had come to understand that the ESA program was not designed for them, not in a day-to-day sense. Logistical obstacles would make using vouchers to attend private school practically impossible for them and their children.”

“It starts with geography. The high-quality private schools are not near their neighborhoods.”

“ProPublica compiled a list of more than 200 private schools in the Phoenix metro area using a survey conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics, as well as a Maricopa County listing and other sources. We found that these schools are disproportionately located to the north and east of downtown – in Midtown, Arcadia, Scottsdale, Paradise Valley and the suburbs – rather than to the south and west, the historically segregated areas where Nunez, Zavala and Velasquez live.”

“Only six of all of these private schools are in Census tracts where families earn less than 50% of the county’s median income of $87,000.”

“So even if lower-income families were able to secure spots at a decent private school and could use vouchers to pay the tuition, they would still have to figure out how to get their children there. After all, while public schools generally provide free transportation via school buses, private schools rarely do.”

…

“Then there’s tuition. Zavala, as well as Nunez and Velasquez, learned that a voucher might not even cover the full price of a private school.”

“A typical voucher from Arizona’s ESA program is worth between $7,000 and $8,000 a year, while private schools in the Phoenix area often charge more than $10,000 annually in tuition and fees, ProPublica found. The price tag at Phoenix Country Day School, one of the best private schools around, ranges from $30,000 to $35,000 depending on the age of the student. (The Hechinger Report has also found that private schools often raise their tuition when parents have vouchers.)”

…

“As they were initially conceived, school vouchers were targeted at helping families in lower-income areas. The first such programs, in cities like Milwaukee and Cleveland, provided money specifically to poor parents who had children in struggling, underfunded public schools, to help them pay tuition at a hopefully better private school.”

“Conservative advocacy groups still say that this is the purpose of vouchers. ‘School choice provides options for low-income families’ by breaking ‘the arbitrary link between a child’s housing and the school he or she can attend,’ the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank with deep ties to former President [and now President-elect] Donald Trump, said in 2019. ‘At the core of the school choice movement is the aspiration that every family obtain the freedom to pursue educational excellence for their children – regardless of their geographic location or socioeconomic background,’ the Goldwater Institute, the Phoenix-based conservative think tank that pioneered and helped enact Arizona’s ESA law, has asserted.”

“But now that groups like these have successfully pushed for vouchers to be made universal in several states, the programs are disproportionately being used by middle- and upper-income parents.”

How weak. How disappointing.

Presently, school choice is nothing more than an American ruse – a trick to make us think that parents have better options when it comes to sending them somewhere to improve their reading, writing, and problem-solving abilities.

The reality is that parents, especially poor parents, don’t have as many choices as they need to help their kids become smarter and stronger learners.

We need more choice in this country, and we need to stop talking about “school choice” and start talking about “learner choice.” Using schools as the unit for change is a non-starter. We have a capabilities to build individual learning plans for every kid – personalized in every way.

Learner choice is what we need to start working on, and spending money, including vouchers, on.

Til tomorrow. SVB